Bring many of the same skills you use for Fantasy Football to win in media sales.
Stetson University football team, c.1900. State Library and Archives of Florida.

You can cut the tension with a knife. The countdown clock is ticking. It will be my turn again in a scant few seconds. Do I break and grab the top WR?? I got my QB, so may not be able to get another top RB. The clock is ticking, and it is my turn. Now I have to choose. Decisions, decisions. The pressure is intense.

Yes, it is draft time for Fantasy Football. Even those of you who don’t play in a league (or two or three) of your co-workers or friends and family know about the building excitement leading up not only to the regular football season, but the Fantasy season as well. People are poring over magazines and tip sheets to determine who they want on their team and what will happen if those players get drafted before you can get to them.

Then the “friendly” bantering begins. This is the time of year in which you can malign your father-in-law or even your boss if they are in your Fantasy league. And each Monday and Tuesday morning it starts again as players reset their teams to maximize points and prepare for the onslaught of smack talk. Good times!

What is it about Fantasy Football that makes those of us who are addicted to it play as if our personal finances and reputations are at stake? It is due to many of the same factors that apply to (and make us love) media sales:

• Preparation. Think about how a sales call would go if we prepared for initial sales calls and our presentations the way we prepare for the draft and for the upcoming week’s game. We should understand the players on the call and their roles. We should understand the competition. We should look ahead at the “what ifs.” Just like the Fantasy draft, you will go into the call with a lot more confidence if you have prepared, and your chances to score will increase dramatically.
• Relationships. You probably have people in your league that are distant friends, or even friends of friends. Yet you become closer to them through discussing a trade or the shared goal of bringing down the guy who got this year’s surprise breakout QB and who wins every week. In media sales, building relationships will get you points and can help you and your customers achieve shared goals.
• Analysis. After each game, Fantasy players figure out what went right so they can do it again next week, and what went wrong so they can bench that player. Media salespeople have a lot of analytics at their disposal, with just as many statistics as is found in Fantasy Football. If you have a CRM system, you can look at the pending dollars and move it on through the media sales funnel or off your field. After a loss, you can reevaluate, regroup and reset, and go in again next week with another play.
• Use your math. In Fantasy Football, Sundays and Mondays are spent calculating how many yards a player on your team needs to get to push you over your opponent. Touchdowns bring you more points, a fumble by the other team loses them points – the factors that can push you to a win are endless. Who would have thought, sitting there in algebra class, that one day you would be figuring out how many points you would need to add plus how many your opponent needs to subtract from 11 men in 12 games on a 100-yard field?! The same holds true for media sales. You are calculating your dollars to goal, your dollars on the books plus dollars asked for in relation to your goal, your AUR, your station’s reach and frequency, your over-90-days outstanding minus paid invoices – it goes on and on. It does help to have a system like Efficio to help with a lot of the math, but I am betting most of you can do 15% (or your basic commission calculation) in your head. Tackle the math for analytics to make you better.
• There’s always next year. Just like in Fantasy Football, in media sales you win some and you lose some. If you weren’t a winner in your league this year, time heals, and things have changed in the last year and will change next year. You can prepare and analyze and start over again. If you missed out on the buy this time, step back and look to the future. And get excited about playing the game all over again.

Here’s wishing all of your days in media sales will be as highly anticipated and exciting as Fantasy Football draft day. But maybe limit the beer and pizza and telling your boss you are going to kick her a** to the draft and not every sales day.

By Kitty Malone
Efficio Solutions Manager of Client Services

Not so great at math and need a media sales CRM and analytics software system?